Direct mail is alive and well and rushing back into mailboxes all over America.

 

While this comes as no surprise to me, it probably is a surprise to anyone listening to the so-called experts predicting the death of direct mail last year.

 

While it’s true there was a significant drop-off in promotional mail volume during the past couple of years, this is a temporary phenomenon of the Great Recession.

 

Now that we’re seeing light at the end of the tunnel, companies are putting more of their marketing dollars back into the traditional direct mail channel.

 

While it’s unlikely we’ll return to the direct mail volumes witnessed just a few short years ago, rest assured direct mail volume is growing.

 

“Credit card mail up in Q4″ is the headline of an article appearing in the February 1, 2010 issue of DM News.  While the article fails to mention the source of all this credit card mail, I can tell you credit goes to Chase Bank.

 

My household, alone, has been receiving multiple offers from Chase for the past several months – often three in one week.  Taking a contrarian position, Chase chose the recession as the ideal time to launch several new credit cards, including ink for business customers and Freedom, Sapphire, and Slate for consumers.

 

While many mailers were busy listening to the erroneous predictions of self-appointed marketing experts and avoiding direct mail, Chase saw a golden opportunity to flood the mail stream with multiple offers that would arrive almost daily in otherwise empty mail boxes.

 

There was no need to “cut through the clutter” for Chase.  It owned the mailbox for the past several months.

 

Details on Chase’s volume were discovered in the article, “Quit complaining about more credit-card offers,” which appears in the February 15, 2010 issue of Advertising Age.

 

Author Beth Snyder Bulik writes, “Led by JPMorgan Chase, which increased mailings by 87% over the same quarter in 2008, and U.S. Bank, which logged a 64% increase, almost all of the major card issuers increased mailings.”  According to Bulik, “Chase now accounts for 25% of all credit card offer mailings.”

 

Chase credit card offers aren’t the only direct mail arriving daily in my mailbox.  Comcast continues flooding me with oversized postcards promoting its cable services.  I’m also seeing a dramatic increase in the smaller-sized magalogs promoting alternative health products and newsletters.

 

One of the most unusual pieces of mail arrived yesterday from the marketing folks at Ford Motor Company.  It is an oversized self-mailer promoting Ford’s all-new 2011 Ford Fiesta which makes its debut in a few months.  Lifting the cover unveils a pop-up of the new Fiesta coming straight at me on a street in New York City.

 

When’s the last time you received an expensive pop-up direct mail piece in the mail?

 

Direct mail has become fun again.

 

The cynics, naysayers, and so-called experts were flat-out wrong when predicting the death of direct mail.

 

While you missed your opportunity to mail when clutter was non-existent, there’s still time to jump back into the direct mail channel as it recovers from the drought of 2008-2009.

 

Direct mail is alive and well!